How does a private golf clubhouse in Big Sky end up on the same bill as an Iron Chef winner and a James Beard Lifetime Achievement honoree? For one long weekend this September, that is exactly what happens at Spanish Peaks, and the answer says something about how this neighborhood actually works that no drive-by guide to Big Sky would know to mention.
Most months, the kitchen at the Tom Weiskopf Clubhouse cooks for members. Golfers coming off the 18th hole, families after a morning at Fort Peaks, the regular rhythm of a private club dining room. This September, that kitchen's chef, Francesco Martinelli, steps outside those walls and onto a stage built for a valley-wide audience. He is one of the named chefs cooking the Opening Night BBQ at The Barn on September 24, the first night of the inaugural Big Sky Food & Wine Festival, alongside John Bates of InterStellar BBQ in Austin, Will Foden of Eglise Lodge, and festival host chef Ming Tsai of BāBā. It is a small detail with a bigger point buried in it: the clubhouse that has always belonged to members now has a chef representing the neighborhood on a program built around more than 40 Michelin Star and James Beard Award winning names.
The Festival Doesn't Just Visit Spanish Peaks. It Cooks Here.
The bigger story for anyone who already lives inside the gates is that two of the festival's marquee ticketed dinners happen on Spanish Peaks property itself, not somewhere across the valley that residents have to drive to.
On Friday, September 25, chef Roberto Alcocer takes over Valle, the restaurant inside Montage Big Sky, for one of the festival's guest chef dinners. Montage sits inside Spanish Peaks Mountain Club, and members already carry preferred access to its restaurants and spa. On Saturday, September 26, chef Wei Chen hosts an omakase dinner at Backcast, another Montage restaurant, as part of the festival's closing weekend programming.
That is not incidental booking. It means that during the first-ever edition of a festival built around more than 40 Michelin and James Beard names, two of its signature dinners are happening inside a neighborhood most of the valley can't get into on a normal Tuesday. For a few nights, the private club becomes one of the places the rest of Big Sky is trying to get a reservation.
For comparison, the same weekend also puts Akira Back and Ming Tsai together for a dinner at One&Only Moonlight Basin, and pairs Nancy Silverton with Marc Forgione for a "Big Night" event at Tips Up in Town Center. The festival is genuinely valley-wide. But Spanish Peaks is one of only a handful of addresses hosting more than one of these dinners, and the only private club doing it twice.
Nancy Silverton, the festival's 2026 James Beard Lifetime Achievement honoree, put it simply when the lineup was announced in July:
"a weekend that is guaranteed to become a cherished tradition"
She was talking about the festival broadly. But for residents, the more useful translation is narrower: whatever this becomes in year two or year three, year one is already happening in your own restaurant.
The Week Before the Week
None of this happens in isolation. The Big Sky Food & Wine Festival lands one week after the second edition of the Lone Peak Film Festival, which runs September 17 through 20 at The Waypoint in Town Center and the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center down in Gallatin Gateway. That festival, now in its second year, is built around a different model than most film events: there are no awards. Instead, the festival covers travel and lodging for one filmmaker from every selected project and organizes a filmmaker retreat around the screenings themselves. Cofounder Daniel Glick has said the goal is films that are "ultimately uplifting, focusing on the good in humanity," organized around four categories: Montana stories, Indigenous stories, conservation, and human resilience.
Put those two weeks together and the back half of September becomes something Spanish Peaks hasn't seen before. A four-day film festival built on community and mentorship, immediately followed by a three-day culinary showcase built on national chef names, both landing in the same nine-day stretch, with two of the food festival's biggest dinners happening inside your own neighborhood.
Here is what that stretch actually looks like on the calendar:
- September 17 to 20 — Lone Peak Film Festival screenings and panels at The Waypoint (Town Center) and the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center (Gallatin Gateway)
- September 24 — Opening Night BBQ at The Barn, featuring Spanish Peaks clubhouse chef Francesco Martinelli alongside Ming Tsai and other visiting chefs
- September 25 — Roberto Alcocer takes over Valle at Montage Big Sky; Akira Back and Ming Tsai cook at One&Only Moonlight Basin
- September 26 — Wei Chen's omakase dinner at Backcast, Montage Big Sky; Nancy Silverton and Marc Forgione at Tips Up in Town Center
What Actually Changes on Your Calendar
If you live at Spanish Peaks and you are not planning to attend either festival, the practical question is simpler than the star power suggests: what changes on your street.
The clubhouse itself keeps running as usual through most of the stretch. The one exception is the night Martinelli is off cooking the Opening Night BBQ, which is worth knowing if you were planning a clubhouse dinner that Thursday. Montage is the bigger shift. Valle and Backcast are both operating as ticketed festival venues on their respective nights, which means walk-in access to those specific dinners will not exist the way it normally would. As of early August 2026, general admission passes to the broader festival were priced at $1,000 and VIP passes at $2,000, which gives some sense of how these particular evenings are being positioned relative to a typical night out at either restaurant.
Because this is the festival's first year, there is no established pattern yet for how crowded Spanish Peaks itself gets versus the main festival grounds at the Big Sky Events Arena, where the Grand Tasting Tent and most of the daytime programming will actually be centered. The two Montage dinners are ticketed, intimate, and by design smaller than the tent events. That likely means less foot traffic through the neighborhood than the festival's overall scale might suggest, but it is a reasonable thing to ask about if you have guests in town that week and want to know what kind of activity to expect near the clubhouse and Montage.
Layer the Lone Peak Film Festival on top of that same stretch and the picture is less about crowd size and more about tempo. Nine days, two very different kinds of events, one shared week where the neighborhood's daily rhythm looks different than it did in August and will look different again in October.
A Private Kitchen, A Public Stage
What makes this September worth paying attention to isn't the size of the guest list. Big Sky has hosted name chefs before, and the valley has no shortage of high-end kitchens. What's different is the direction the traffic runs. Usually the draw is inward, members and their guests coming to Spanish Peaks for what the club already offers. This year, for a handful of nights, the club's own kitchen is part of what's pulling the rest of the valley's attention toward it, and the club's own chef is out representing the neighborhood somewhere else entirely.
That is a small shift, but it's the kind of detail that tells you something true about a place. Spanish Peaks has always operated as a private, self-contained world inside a bigger resort community. This September, for the first time, the boundary between that private world and the valley's biggest public showcase gets genuinely thin, if only for nine days.
If you're weighing what a season like this means for the long-term character of the neighborhood, or you're simply trying to figure out how a property inside Spanish Peaks fits into a moment like this one, the team at Life in Big Sky knows this club, its calendar, and its rhythms as well as anyone. Live Big. Connect with our team.
